Princess Diana's death was met with extraordinary public expressions of grief, and her public funeral at Westminster Abbey on 6 September drew an estimated 3 million mourners and onlookers in London, as well as worldwide television coverage watched by 2.5 billion people worldwide.

Just after midnight on August 31, 1997, in Paris, a car carrying Diana, Princess of Wales, and her new love interest, "Dodi" Fayed, plus a bodyguard and a driver, went out of control in a Paris tunnel and crashed. Fayed and the driver were killed instantly; Diana died later in a hospital despite efforts to save her. The bodyguard survived despite critical injuries.

The world reacted.

First came horror and shock. Then blame: at first, the entire blame seemed directed at the paparazzi, photographers who were following the princess' car, and from whom the driver was apparently trying to escape. Later tests showed the driver had been well over the legal alcohol limit, but immediate blame was on the photographers and their seemingly incessant quest to capture images of Diana that could be sold to the press.

Then came an outpouring of sorrow and grief. The Spencers, Diana's family, established a charitable fund in her name, and within a week, $150 million in donations had been contributed.

Tabloid newspapers with sensationalist headlines written about the Diana/Dodi affair just before her death were pulled from newstands by request of the publishers.

Diana's funeral, on September 6, drew worldwide attention. About half the people in the world saw it on television. Millions turned out to line the path of the funeral procession.

Princess Diana loved to do/support charity works:

Diana had truly touched a human chord among the British people, contrasted to the other royals of the House of Windsor who seemed stand-offish, arrogant, and cold -- and the grief was a recognition of the loss of what prime minister Blair termed "the people's princess"

The 1980s realization of the AIDS crisis was one in which Diana played a part. Her willingness to touch and hug AIDS sufferers, at a time when many in the public wanted to quarantine those with AIDS based on irrational and uneducated fears of easy communicability of the disease, helped change how AIDS patients were treated.